The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address

By John Haynes Holmes

Today we need Emerson again—a profounder Emerson, a sterner Emerson, but still Emerson! Unitarians need him—to be taught anew that no arid reliance upon man can be fruitful of religion which does not see in man the divine in the human, and thus the sure evidence of God. Christians need him—that they may learn anew that man is not incorrigbly bad but aspiringly good, and that not what man is but what he strives to be is the prophecy of the soul's victory over time and fate. The world needs him—that in America and Europe, on every continent and island of the sea, it may be known that no rule of one man or many men, in the totalitarian or in the democratic state, can vindicate itself and thus survive, which does not seek, through whatever organization of the social whole, the release and enrichment of personality. What would it not mean to this despairing age if another voice were to speak a second Divinity School Address! Like clear, pure mountain air blowing through the fetid atmosphere of some charnel house, like the light of rosy morning dawning upon the darkness of a night of fear, like the call of silver trumpets in the ears of dying men, would sound again the words: "There are resources in us on which we have not drawn. Faith makes us, and not we it. . . . Let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the (systems of earth). If you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul."

If I were to name the characteristic thinker of our time, it would be Oswald Spengler, author of that stupendous masterpiece, "The Decline of the West." In this work Spengler presents a fatalistic theory of history. Civilizations rise only to fall. They transcribe predetermined cycles which, like the orbits of the stars, reach from darkness into darkness. Upon our civilization, as upon all others, rests the doom of dissolution. Time does not suffer itself to be halted. The end is once more at hand. As for ourselves, says Spengler, "We have been born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the last position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. . . . The honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man."

In answer to this bleak surrender to destiny, I offer the challenge of Emerson, a prophet of our time as of his own. He also can wait, "can do without what is called success." But he waits not to succumb to fate, but to seize and master it. For to Emerson, "existence (itself) is victory." Therefore

The sun set, but set not his hope:

Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:

Fixed on the enormous galaxy,

Deeper and older seemed his eye;

And matched his sufferance sublime

The taciturnity of time.

He spoke, and words more soft than rain

Brought the Age of Gold again.